Jeff Wright, that was my first thought as well. Sometimes DEI doesn’t just plug up the plumbing, sometimes it kills people.

“Former Boeing Senior Official Refuses to Fly on “Max” Airplanes Because of Shoddy Workmanship He Witnessed Firsthand”
https://revolver.news/2024/02/former-boeing-official-refuses-to-fly-on-max-airplanes-shoddy-workmanship-witnessed-firsthand/

I never had much use for Goddard…Greens run that place—and all they want by-and-large is climate sats they can fix to blackmail American Industry.

The level of ire libertarians have for MSFC is better aimed at Goddard.

I want them shuttered.

OSAM-1 started about a decade ago as Restore-L, with the goal of launching as soon as 2020 to refuel Landsat 7. The mission was renamed OSAM-1 in 2020 with the addition of payloads to perform in-space assembly and manufacturing activities.

Well, there is where NASA went wrong. Six years into the project they piled on a whole new set of requirements, changing everything, not just the scope but the mass properties, length of mission, additional electronics that must work with the existing electronics, the schedule, new preliminary and critical design reviews, test plans, etc. NASA decided to kludge onto the existing project an entirely different project, which should have been handled by resetting the whole spacecraft back to the conception phase in order to assure that everything would worked together — or better yet, separate the two onto different spacecraft, each with their own projects and priorities. The whole in-space manufacturing and assembly project was at the conception phase while the orbital refueling (retanking) project should have been nearing completion. What a mismatch of project phases.

So, really, we have lost four years wasted on the manufacturing and assembly project, and whoever gets to continue this is going to get the chance to start afresh, which is what NASA should have done in the first place in 2020.

“In our discussions with Maxar officials, they acknowledged that they were no longer profiting from their work on OSAM-1,” OIG noted in its report. “Moreover, project officials stated that OSAM-1 does not appear to be a high priority for Maxar in terms of the quality of its staffing.”

That is hardly surprising. I am so glad that I am not working on OSAM-1 at Maxar, because that last sentence would have called me low quality. There’s a project to leave off anyone’s résumé.

Meanwhile, this worthy will have money thrown at him by the sports world:

https://people.com/nfl-prospect-tyler-owens-doesnt-believe-in-space-8603318

My inner Salieri is devising all kinds of ill just about now…

…something involving a compound fracture…